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My PrintrBot z-axis got misaligned when I inadvertently left something on the printer bed after sending a new print to be printed. Did not realize till I heard the grinding noise. I cut the power but it was already too late. Upon restarting, the Z-home was almost an inch away from the bed.

Watched couple of videos on z calibration. Manually brought down the hotend till it was almost touching the bed and then fired up the auto leveling wizard. Tried a cube print first to see if it would turn out to be ok. The resulting cube was 0.3 short all around (from earlier reference cubes printed).

Cleaning the metal top with alcohol prior to applying the tape to remove any adhesive residue may prevent the tape from pulling up during prints (i did not encounter this issue but tried it nevertheless, keeps adhesive buildup from Blue Tape) .

if printing ABS – wipe the Kapton with Acetone, if printing PLA – wipe the Kapton with rubbing alcohol

I print PLA mostly 195 and 45 mm/s. I find that 195 works for most of the filaments I have tried.

Wait for the bed temp to equalize with room temperature after printing is done. Prints just pop off without effort. For flat prints, I use boxcutter to pry an edge till it just pops off. For taller prints I just have to twist the print and it pops off.

Wish List

PrintinZ – Eliminates blue tape and surface prep for printing. Will try it out once I’m confident in fiddling with calibration. Upgrade for PrintinZ – Plate clips to attach to Printrbot

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NASA has made available various 3D printable models that can be downloaded and printed by hobbyists. Wanted to try out Curiosity Rover on my PrintrBot. The supplied models come in two sizes. The large is too big for PrintrBot Simple. So decided to try out the small version.

Body, Arms and Legs were printed with Hatchbox White PLA. While the wheels are printed with Toner Plastics Red PLA. The settings are same for both of them.

PrintBot Simple Metal with Heated Bed

Filament : Hatchbox White PLA, Toner Plastics Red PLA

Layer Height : 0.1984

Print Speed : 45

Print Temperature : 195

Bed Temperature : 65

Curiosity Rover : NASA

Curiosity is a car-sized robotic rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL). Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17 UTC. The Bradbury Landing site was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the center of the rover’s touchdown target after a 563,000,000 km (350,000,000 mi) journey.The rover’s goals include: investigation of the Martian climate and geology; assessment of whether the selected field site inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, including investigation of the role of water; and planetary habitability studies in preparation for future human exploration.

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Was looking into 3d Scanners. Makerbot makes one that is $799 but did not feel like shelling out that much and their approach to open source. The Ciclop is a open source design by a spanish company BQ who also sells a kit by the same name. This kickstarter takes their design and has made it more affordable. This is ofcourse based on the assumption that the backers will be printing their own 3D parts for the scanner.

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Printing workflow works well with PrintrBot connected to the laptop but the laptop gets tied up for the duration. Also the printing stops if the laptop goes to sleep.

You can print untethered with PrintrBot by using the sdcard but it is an hassle to switch sdcards and copying the sliced files. KeepingYouAwake, a Caffeine clone works very well in a pinch to prevent the laptop from sleeping.

While not exactly untethered since it will still be connected to Raspberry Pi, want to explore Octoprint on Raspberry Pi. Have one RPi2’s lying around. Should be perfect for this.

OctoPrint developed by @foosel is a complete 3D Printing host solution. Open sourced and extensible it has matured very well. There are many guidestosetupOctoPrint on RPi so I would not go in detail here.

There is also AstroPrint forked from Octoprint but moving most of the functionality to the web including slicing. The workflow setup works in conjunction with AstroBox which connects to their cloud service which acts as a remote host. This would work very well for multiple printer setups (one can dream!). The AstroBox can be self configured on a RPi.

Setting up RPi for OctoPrint.

You can follow the manual setup here or get a prebuilt image for the OctoPrint, called OctoPi by @Guysoft

Set up the OctoPi – is as simple as changing the /boot/octopi-network.txt on the SDcard after copying the image. Note: The image is going to be used on Linux so be careful in editing the text file. Spent an hour troubleshooting why RPi could not connect to the router since I edited the file on windows (even though using notepad and saving as a text file).

Once the network settings are configured, the OctoPi should automatically boot and get online.